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By
Jack Moore

The bipartisan budget deal announced this week by
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) goes a long way toward
clearing up the widespread budget uncertainty that has plagued federal agencies
for the last two years.

The agreement, which the House approved Thursday and the Senate appears likely to OK this week, cancels part of the across-
the-board sequestration cuts scheduled to go into effect next year and provides a
common top-line discretionary spending figure — $1.012 trillion.

But the agreement doesn't actually set individual agency funding for next year.

That's the job of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the leaders of
whom now must write an official spending bill that spells out exactly how much
each
agency gets to spend next year and on what.

In a normal year — all too rare in Washington these days — the
committees each separately write 12 different appropriations bill that are then
voted on by their respective chamber of Congress one at a time. Differences are
sorted out in conference negotiations.

But with just a month until the current stopgap spending bill keeping the
government open expires, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House
committee, said Thursday he would begin work on an omnibus spending bill that
contains all 12 bills wrapped into one.

In floor remarks shortly before the House
voted to approve the budget agreement, he said he was eager to "get to work and
make the hard, thoughtful, responsible, line-by-line funding decisions that are
Congress' duty to make."

The bipartisan budget agreement "means we can fund the operations of government
through regular, annual appropriations bills, instead of through last minute,
stopgap bills that put the government on autopilot," she said in a statement when the deal was
announced earlier in the week. "It also means creating certainty that's crucial to
the stability of our economy and our standing and reputation in the world."

The painstaking appropriations process will be made a little easier this year
because the budget agreement's topline spending number removes at least one choke
point from the process. For much of the year, the House and Senate remained at odds over how to account for the
across-the-board cuts, which left their competing spending plans some $91 billion
apart and contributed, in part, to the 16-day shutdown in October .

Still, time is tight.

As it stands now, there are only a few days when both houses of Congress are in
session between now and Jan. 15 — the date the current continuing resolution
funding the government expires. The House is already in recess for the holidays
until next year.